Sometimes, being successful with food is about finding the exact right nutrient mix for your body and your needs. And eliminating the foods that don’t serve you. Or about finely calibrating your lunches so you’re eating a volume of protein that felt previously unimaginable. 

And sometimes it’s as simple as having a plan for what you’re going to eat, so every meal doesn’t catch you by surprise. It’s just about having enough food prepped beforehand so you’re never suddenly starving without a healthy option anywhere in the realm of possibility (enter: the dreaded cheddar bunny lunch—a universal archenemy of parents everywhere with good intentions and limited time on their hands). So, here are a few tried and tested ways to give yourself a little more time and a little more advance notice on those pesky meals that crop up at least three times a day, every day. 

Set Yourself Up For Success

Clean out your fridge. Because if the fridge is full and you can’t see what’s in there, I pretty much guarantee you won’t use what’s in there. Be ruthless when you order in and don’t save leftovers that you have no intention of eating again. It’s obviously best not to waste food, but be honest with yourself. Not eating something after a week of letting it sit in your fridge is not any better than calling it today and throwing it away (usually because it’s not very good—or because it won’t reheat very well at all). And buy some (inexpensive) airtight container that you like, that stack neatly in the fridge you have. I prefer to minimize plastic in my food storage, and like rectangular containers better than circular ones for space optimization, so I use these—and then supplement with these lower-cost ones. But this ultimately comes down to personal preference. Get what works for you, and make space for it.   

Double Every Recipe 

I always make recipes that say they serve two, and assume I will have leftovers since there are only three of us in my home, and one of us eats very little of the family meal—but that never seems to be the case. I find that I’m much happier if I just acknowledge that and make double the recipe if I want to have leftovers. (And if you have a larger family, triple it!) If I’m trying out a new recipe I’m unsure of, I don’t do this, but with anything that I know will be successful, this is an easy way to keep food on hand without spending an entire day making food in advance. 

Involve an AI 

Ask ChatGPT or Claude to help you plan out a week of recipes, and spit it out as a table instead of long-form text. I like to feed the AI 10-12 recipes that I like, share what else I have in the fridge that I need to use, and tell it what ingredients I never want to use (I hate mayonnaise and am vegetarian), and then ask it to source other recipes I might like. Some of them are great, others, less so, but it’s a good shortcut. And then once we settle on a group of recipes for the week, I ask it to put together a shopping list based on all the ingredients included (if you want to double some recipes, tell it to do this first), and then I copy paste into an ongoing Google sheet, and use this as my guide. I haven’t been able to get an AI to do all the work for me, to date, but it’s a pretty good helper.  

Make It About Friendship 

I highly recommend playdates with friends who you feel truly comfortable with, who can come over and prep and chop and sauté and cook with you, so you can make dinner and plan ahead for the next few nights—together. I do this often with a close friend who has similarly aged kids and it feels like a gift. It returns me to a time when my husband and I would cook elaborate meals together on weekends, often not sitting down to dinner until 9 or 10 p.m., exhausted but delighted with ourselves. That way of life isn’t a reality for us anymore, but making dinner and planning a few meals with a friend can be. And it’s wonderful.